What If Yemen Were Phoenix?

Kevin Jon Heller asks in response to my post the other night:

1. Politics aside, does the Obama administration have the legal right to kill an American citizen allegedly associated with Al-Qaeda who is living in Phoenix?
2. Standing aside, if word leaked out that the Obama administration intended to kill that American citizen living in Phoenix, should the judiciary . . . invoke the political-question doctrine to avoid litigating a challenge to the planned attack?

To the first question, the simple answer is that I do not believe that the government has the right to engage in targeted killings domestically, for at least two overlapping reasons. The CIA does not have the authority to engage in covert operations at home, for starters. More fundamentally, and even if the military were the government component in question, if Al Aulaqi were in Phoenix and the government knew where he was, it would clearly have the power to arrest him, and that power would in my opinion convey a certain duty to do so. We have, after all, a Due Process Clause. In my opinion, only where the arrest of a citizen is genuinely impossible without undue risk to forces is a resort to lethal force against that individual legally justified. I say this tentatively because I can imagine plausible counter-arguments on both sides. But that feels like the crux of the matter to me. Where the exertion of law enforcement power is plausible (at least with respect to a citizen), due process requires it; where it is not plausible yet the reasons of state are compelling enough to invoke the president's foreign policy powers and his powers as commander in chief, due process does not require that the president fruitlessly attempt to arrest someone who is outside of power to arrest. In Al Aulaqi's case, arrest is impossible because he is in some ungoverned area of Yemen. There are imaginable situations domestically in which the arrest of Heller's hypothetical person might be similarly impossible, but they are basically limited to situations of  insurrection or rebellion.
Heller's second question is more complicated. There are a lot of people, after all, who think the government is out to get them--the sort of people who think their teeth have listening devices implanted in them, for example. So as a preliminary matter, the fact that someone alleges that he is being targeted by the government does not by itself warrant judicial attention if he can show no adverse action taken against him. If Al Aulaqi were in Phoenix and merely alleged that the government was targeting him for death, I would expect a court to giggle and throw the case out.
If, by contrast, the administration made it clear that there was this guy at his home in Phoenix that the CIA or the military was planning to kill on orders of the president, a lawsuit would clearly be appropriate. It would also be somewhat beside the point. The problem at that stage--that is, the problem of a lawless president engaging in covert actions domestically to kill individuals who are available for arrest--would be way to big to handle through an ACLU lawsuit. It would be a matter of impeachment.
If we limit Heller's question, meanwhile, to situations that are not total fantasies, the government would issue a warrant for this person's arrest and his remedy to the extent that he felt targeted would be to turn himself in and confront the charges against him. And in that case, the appropriate remedy would not be preemptive litigation. As I have argued before, that is also Al Aulaqi's remedy now. Nothing is stopping him from surrendering.